


Our dear queen

by tigrrmilk



Category: Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
Genre: Gen, charing cross is really important guys, the floating market, this isn't about god i swear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:32:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,060
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk/pseuds/tigrrmilk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“LORD OF NOTHING. BARON OF SHIT,” a voice came, breathless and long-dead.</p>
<p>De Carabas spoke with that deathly grin that he kept with him always. “Marquis de Carabas, yes.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Our dear queen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [unsettled](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unsettled/gifts).



 

 

But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)  
Cry;--and upon thy so sore loss  
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder  
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

\---

**Francis Thompson, from ‘The Kingdom of God’**

 

  
†

  
God save the queen  
We mean it man

\---

**The Sex Pistols, from 'God Save the Queen'**

  
†

 

 

“I see you got your coat back, then,” Richard said, and gestured with his cup.

The Marquis de Carabas nodded, as if he wasn’t practically buried inside it, smelling his own collar. Richard briefly considered raising a toast, but quickly just drank instead, and burnt the back of his throat on the - well, Richard wasn’t sure what it was. Some old gin?

Some very old gin.

“Do we know when the next market is?” Richard asked, trying to sound casual. He scraped one of his hands on his knee. He’d taken the odd job here and there, but it had been a while.

And he’d started to miss the people.

“Forest Hill,” de Carabas said, and grimaced. He was cold, and his own glass was mostly untouched. It had a big chip on one side, and a cat painted on the other. He’d produced it from a pocket, and a flask of whatever it was that they were drinking. “Along the canal.” His voice was croaky, and he was - he was on edge. As if he could see something that Richard couldn’t.

Richard squinted because the cat had started to move. He blinked and it was still moving, but he thought it might not be polite to mention it.

Funny, he thought, to go all the way down to Forest Hill. The last market had been beneath the Marble Arch. Or...

No, Marble Arch?

He’d not known for months after he’d moved down to London that there was actually an arch there. But there it was. It wasn't just a name.

It really had been a long time.

On a recent trip through the underside nearby, there’d been so much black water. Cigarette butts. And no rats. He’d even crouched down and made noises and, just. Some fog? A bubble in his head.

He’d ended up in Lancaster Gate, London Above, running through Kensington Gardens. They were locked. He’d felt the knife against his hip. The forged key where it rested on his chest, the waxed string around his neck, and all that felt alive above and below was a low hum of a song he knew in his knees and his stomach, a cut-down tree, and something dancing that couldn’t stop.

His feet were dusty instead of wet.

There weren’t any words.

He’d averted his eyes. Even here, it was hard to breathe. He’d stood still, waiting for something to move towards him, but nothing had.

Hours later he’d made his way back down below. The floor was almost dry, and the rats held their heads high.

De Carabas scratched the little painted cat’s head, and it flopped itself down. He drank it all, and finally smiled at Richard - a bad smile, as if there was nothing right in the world, the Thames, or any of the Londons they had ever known.

Richard felt the knife, and thought about the route down. “Why’s it been so long?”

“We’ll have to go there a different way,” de Carabas said.

  


*

 

Richard had never been much of one for buses in London. He hadn’t left the small town, one bus an hour until 6pm if you’re lucky life behind for sitting in traffic and rubbing your hands against the windows every five minutes to get rid of the steam only to find out you’ve not moved or you’ve missed your stop.

He resisted the urge to grab hold of the Marquis as he gracefully stepped up onto the back platform of one as it passed, and Richard stumbled after him instead, ran, almost missed it - and then leapt on as it stopped at a red light. He hit his shoulder on the pole, and swore at himself. The conductor sneered at him blankly, then forgot that he was there.

The bus was almost empty. Richard sat down on the back seat, nursing his arm. Was there a funnybone in your shoulder, too? De Carabas stood, one hand loosely on the pole, like he didn’t really need to hold on, and he felt the wind rattle through his coat with a sigh and a slight toss of his head. He looked the few passengers up and down, without interest.

Nobody worth a ha’penny.

Nobody who owed him a favour. Well, except.

He heard Richard groan as he pulled at his own arm.

The bus’s lights went off, and the red and green lights from outside hazed in.

  


*

 

When he sat down finally, de Carabas put his shoes on the top of the seat in front of him. Richard was not surprised.

He took a sip from his flask. He didn’t offer it to Richard this time.

  


*

  


Richard huddled into himself on the canal boat. The water was so dark that he couldn’t see anything reflected in it, and they kept passing through low, rotten trees. He batted away the leaves and mulch, but felt the dank settle into his hair anyway.

De Carabas tossed broken bits of tree into the water and stared at them as they fell.

Or rather, he scowled.

  


*

 

The canal wound round for a while - and it moved from being hidden by little dead trees to being the only path through a thick forest. Richard smelt pine, and linden, and smoke, and dead fruit.

They stopped at a lot of locks.

As the water rose, it didn’t ripple.

Richard wondered if they’d miss the market entirely.

The Marquis held a half-eaten apple in one hand, and stood near the front of the boat.

  


*

  


RIchard heard the market before he reached it, as was customary. Up one final lock, and through a clearing, and there - a bank, a clearing at the top of the hill. He almost fell out of the boat, which was made more embarrassing by a couple of the people nearest to him dropping into very deep bows in response to his arrival.

“Er,” he said, as he desperately tried not to fall over.

He was saved from his embarrassment by a small girl who shoved a container of a particularly pungent curry into his hands. He watched her walk away, a parakeet clutching onto her left shoulder-blade.

The music all seemed to be converging. Or at least, lots of people were playing their own kind of dirge.

The Marquis smoothed down his lapels. Richard tried not to spill curry down his shirt.

  


*

 

De Carabas abandoned Richard, of course, but Richard didn’t mind. He caught up with a few friends and stallholders (“Er, yes, it’s very... fetching,” he said, when asked about Olympia’s new hat. She didn’t blink and often seemed to stop breathing entirely, he found it very unnerving), and cocked his head to one side when they finished telling him what was new.

He waited for them to speak.

“Our dear queen,” Old Bailey said.

The ratspeakers put their arms out and looked down. “'s spread far north an’ east as The Silicon Roundel,” the littlest girl said. The girl next to her crossed herself, but diagonally, in slashes. She had big round eyes.

De Carabas’s arm was round his shoulder. “Well, well,” de Carabas said, and nodded to the rats. “My old friend. I think it might be time we took a stroll.”

As they walked towards the edge of the clearing, a nearby pipe player doffed his cap and threw a knife at them. Richard caught it, swore, and nodded back.

  


*

  


De Carabas had picked up a strange map from Old Bailey. Large chunks of it had been eaten by something that apparently had very triangular teeth, and parts of it seemed to be splattered in mud. As Richard watched him smooth it out on the ground, he saw the mud shift, slightly. It was concentrated in patches. De Carabas touched the biggest spot of it, and licked his finger. He made a face.

“Nobody can breathe,” he said. He smoothed his hair. “When was the last time you visited Charing Cross?”

Richard blinked at him. Was he supposed to know that? All he could remember about it suddenly was the McDonalds near the station.

“I helped Door with that problem she was having with the plinth,” Richard said, in a tone that said I Know This Is The Wrong Answer, “maybe, er, five months ago?”

De Carabas stared at him. “Charing Cross,” he said.  “Not Trafalgar, the fool. You have not visited Charing Cross?” He held up his curled fist, and tapped the small gap at the middle of the curl. He smiled, meanly.

“I'm good for the the freedoms,” Richard said, weakly. “Is... is Charing Cross something to do with the palm of your hand? I’m sorry, I don’t...”

“She’s the centre,” de Carabas said. “The root. And something’s started to rot. You can smell it downwind. They certainly can.” He nodded in the direction of the ratspeakers nearby, who were biting their thumbs and fingers, and shuffling their feet as if it was colder than they’d realised.

Richard had only managed half of his curry. Nobody had asked for his help, but they’d all kind of... tossed their heads.

“A lot of people aren’t here,” he said, and looked back over at the hodgepodge of stalls and tired monsters and people who’d made clothes out of the weirdest debris London had to offer. Even the centurions seemed to be down on their numbers, although they had no problem with taking it in turns to be ganged up on by the others and thrown into the canal while maintaining a stoic face.

But beyond them, Richard saw a shepherd. He averted his face.

“I was beneath Marble Arch recently,” Richard began.

  


*

  


They spent the next hour assembling a cross from the junk they could find at the stalls. Richard gave one of the stallholders the knife that he’d caught earlier on - too small for him, and tradition dictated that he couldn’t keep it anyway. The woman he gave it to tested her finger on it, and smiled at the blood.

De Carabas mostly watched while Richard picked things up and tried to bind them together, because helping out was basically beneath him. Richard assembled something from wood and bone and debris, and although Carabas sighed he didn’t actually say it was wrong. He took it on one hand and tapped it with another. Part of the bone fell off. The cross stayed together.

He ran his fingers across it, and then pulled a pen out from the hem of his coat and started to draw across it.

“There’s no ink in your pen,” Richard said, helpfully. De Carabas did not dignify this observation with a response.

He tucked the cross under his arm.

“We’re going the quick way,” de Carabas said, when Richard started back towards the boats. He looked across the market, beyond the centurions (who were now all drying each other’s hair). The shepherd was still there.

“Don’t meet her gaze,” he said.

On the way over, de Carabas exchanged a battered business card for two thick, deep-blue scarves. He gave one to Richard, and wound one around his own neck and face, but let it go slack so that his mouth was free.

  


*

  


Richard had never been so close to a shepherd before.

Well, probably on family holidays in the highlands, but that was different.

She smelt of many things, none of which reminded Richard of sheep.

“I understand you have concerns about the borders of your fiefdom,” de Carabas said. “That you are not being paid your proper fealty. That there is so much unpleasantness to come.”

The shepherd made no reply.

“I, of course, share your concerns.” De Carabas now thrust Richard towards the shepherd.

The shepherd bowed her head.

“Of course, the problem is not with your land, but the pin-prick in the middle of the map.”

The shepherd did not respond.

“He has the Freedom, and as such -”

The shepherd extended her crook to Richard, who was staring resolutely at her ankles. De Carabas poked him in the ribs, and he reached out for it.

“I did not remember anyone offering you anything of the sort, de Carabas,” the shepherd said, as he reached out for it too. His arm slackened, but he pitched forwards as soon as the shepherd started to move, and Richard felt himself being pulled, a rush in his ears, and his arms flailed and he felt an arm which he held onto, eyes closed, not even dirt beneath his feet.

  


*

 

De Carabas landed on his feet, and jerked his arm so that Richard let go and promptly landed on his arse.

“Fool,” he said, as Richard’s arm tangled in his scarf and it dropped to the floor. He pulled it around Richard’s neck too tightly, and covered his nose and mouth with it. Richard remembered commuting by tube and trying his hardest not to breathe through his mouth.

The cross lay on the floor next to them. It looked... more real, somehow. A piece of wood painted white glinted, although it was more night here than Richard had felt for a long time.

He wasn’t sure if he could hear bells or the blood in his head.

They slowly turned. Richard wiped the ash off his face.

He suddenly remembered all of the portraits on the platforms at Charing Cross tube station. Byron, and - Henry VIII, and Anne Boleyn? They weren’t even from the same time period. He was probably wrong. Mind the gap.

There was no sky, but no ceiling either. “Give it back,” de Carabas whispered, teeth gritted, but he wasn’t speaking to Richard. He didn’t mean the cross.

A monument had crashed to the ground - it looked like one of the war memorials that you found in every town, with a goddess carved in the middle and the names of all of the young men from the village who had died in the Somme and Passchendaele, going soft and unreadable through the decades. But this one just had steps spiralling up around it, and a few faces here and there.

There weren’t any names.

Richard knelt down next to it. His eyes streamed.

“It won’t bring your idol back,” de Carabas said, louder this time. “Northampton for that.”

He paused. Richard put the cross on top of some of the bricks and sat back on his feet.

“I’m so sick of all of this,” Richard said, because de Carabas had stopped speaking and he was sick of it, he really was.

“Do you know what this is?” de Carabas asked, and held up the replica of the key that Richard wore around his neck. Richard touched his collarbone, and yes, it was gone, that was his. He hadn’t noticed.

“Nobody is going to pray for you, either,” he said. “All of the words eventually wear down, so why bother? Speak to me. We don’t answer to your barony.” De Carabas’s voice was raw, but he held his chin up. “Maybe it’s time you answered to ours.”

“LORD OF NOTHING. BARON OF SHIT,” a voice came, breathless and long-dead.

De Carabas spoke with that deathly grin that he kept with him always. “Marquis de Carabas, yes.”

Richard scrambled to his feet.

De Carabas pulled out the flask from his coat, kissed it and then unscrewed the top. He poured its dregs onto the cross, which started to hiss.

Richard bit back an inappropriately-timed question about what, exactly, they had been drinking, since he was pretty sure that gin didn’t do that.

The monument started to crumple in on itself more, and Richard heard a low hum. He felt the handle of his knife, and coughed.

“A COUNTERFEIT LAIRD,” the voice came, fainter this time.

“I’m not asking for your loyalty,” de Carabas said, and he kicked the last remaining few stairs. They disintegrated. “Don’t you think it’s time,” he said, “you locked the door and went to find Eleanor? Don’t you think that really would be your easiest solution?”

He bent over and ran his finger down the cross, which had shrunk into itself but was somehow more complete for it. Richard caught a flash of a woman, curled in on herself, trying to get away from the shape of the cross.

“MY DEAR QUEEN,” the voice wobbled.

“You are as dead as she was then,” de Carabas said, unconcerned.

“KING,” the voice said. It had started to rain.

“London doesn’t have a king,” Richard said. He felt very funny. “It has a couple of mayors who like to ride around in their golden coach, but it doesn’t have a king. We’d have run them out by now.”

“Let us back in, you bastard,” de Carabas said, his voice quiet again.

“MARQUIS -” the voice broke off.

“London is not build around this lie,” de Carabas said, and licked his finger. He held it up above his head. “It’s going north. You can still catch it.”

He kicked at the rubbish in front of them. “Get going, old man. You were tired of life before you gutted it last time, and we’re not going to take her image back.”

“MY DEAR -” the voice broke again, and all of the dust and ash and broken steps furled in together until they formed one very tall old man. He picked up the cross, and put out his arms.

Richard held up his knife, and de Carabas didn’t bother to stifle his laughter at the gesture, but Richard felt something sharp stir in the air.

The old man stepped back into the wind and rain, and was thrown like hail. Richard closed his eyes.

“KNIGHT OF NO REALM,” the voice came, for the last time.

De Carabas saluted with a flourish.

Richard heard a bus somewhere, and nobody was singing. Three men walked past, arm-in-arm-in-arm, and none of them paid them a second glance. Richard watched as they walked away.

Richard coughed again. “When you’re tired of London...” he said, feeling very clever.

De Carabas put an arm around his shoulder. “I am not finishing that sentence,” de Carabas said. “Do you have any idea what a bore he is?”


End file.
